This blog is a special topic for special occasions. I started my blog series a few years ago. It was not a solo initiative. I have been a part of a team where many subject matter experts have been posting blog articles as per their level of expertise. The traffic on the “PLM Tech Talk” has consistently grown over this period and I am grateful to all the audience. This blog is a “century marker” which means it’s my post number 100. Accordingly, I have picked a hot topic as cloud solutions are everywhere these days.
Abaqus cloud offering has been around since a while. The cloud tenant is a named user configuration. However, it should be clear that the “named-user” feature is only to access the cloud tenant. Once on the tenant, Abaqus tokens on the cloud are available to all the cloud users like a floating license feature. Before we get into details of how Abaqus tokens work on cloud, let’s have a look at the tenant itself.
The cloud tenant is a general offering from the Dassault Systemes without any Abaqus in it and it’s a prerequisite for any add-on. The Abaqus user interface on the cloud is called as “simulation manager”. This user interface should not be confused with Abaqus CAE. Simulation manager allows users to upload and configure the Abaqus input file to the cloud tenant. The configuration parameters include Abaqus version, precision options: single vs. double, level of execution: syntax check vs. full run etc. Simulation Manager is NOT a replacement of Abaqus CAE as FEA pre-processing does not make sense on the cloud and it’s not available either.
Once configured, Abaqus job can be submitted to the cloud-compute server. The Abaqus uses on-cloud hardware resources for computing. The output data is stored on the cloud as well. The job runs typically like a traditional abaqus job. All the output files such as dat file, status file, message file and odb files are created and can be downloaded.
The interesting part is hardware available to the user. The cloud tenant offers up to 192 cores for large jobs, either standard or explicit. The user should have access to enough “tokens” of Abaqus on cloud to access these cores, if required.
A question immediately pops up in the user’s mind: Who has got the money to run abaqus on 192 cores? The curiosity is genuine, but we have a solution that suits your wallet. Dassault Systemes now offer Abaqus on an alternate license scheme called as “credits”. The credits are a non-renewable form of Abaqus license available at 1 percent cost of equivalent number of tokens. It’s a very affordable subscription service for Abaqus, both on cloud as well as on-premise. However, credits once consumed do not return to the license pool like tokens. Hence, credits should be consumed only occasionally as per urgency of the situation.
How fast can we solve the job using credits? It’s not a hyperbole and let us mention it boldly: “We have reduced the compute time of large jobs from days to hours using compute credits on cloud.” Every job scales differently but the time savings are substantial in most cases.
What’s the right configuration for your organization? I can only say the hybrid of tokens and credits works best for all as credits should be used occasionally, not routinely. The ratio of tokens to credits to procure depends on specific circumstances. If you like what you have seen in this article and wish to take benefits of Abaqus on cloud, let’s talk.
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